Curse of the Damned
by WL.Erkling
Summary: She will always call to them.


Disclaimer: Disclaimer: Characters, settings, themes, etc. from the Harry Potter universe are property of J.K Rowling. I make no profit from the writing or sharing of this story.

Beta love: olivieblake

* * *

"You know I wouldn't do it!" His voice carries in the small clearing, absorbed into the moss-covered trees. "What possible reason could I have?" It's starting to crack; he's been screaming for hours now. Trapped in the arms of his captors, he slumps—exhausted.

As they drag him along the pathway, closer to the boat, he hears the clicking of something familiar. His head cocks to the side and his eyes clench shut, trying to remember—to pull the memory from behind his defenses. It's not the clack-clack of the boots, however, that brings him round. It's _his_ voice.

"Ye've got every reason, _Black_."

He tries to spin, to look back at the man, but the two men holding him grip tightly.

"Let him go, boys." The deep penetrating bass of that voice sinks deep into him, wriggles something dark and unpleasant to the surface of his skin.

He limps back toward the nearest tree, where he can rest his shattered knee. They've caned him a few times too many and his weight is a bit much, but he refuses to meet this man on the ground.

Sirius Black will not meet his fate _on his knees_.

"Still a bit of fight left in yeh, then?" He chuckles, stepping toward Sirius. Sniffing the air—as if the stale smell of piss and fear could be anything but putrid—he turns back to Sirius and grins. "Aye, it's coming, Black. You know it just as well as I. I can smell it on the air. I can hear it on the wind and I know you count the days, too." Those boots are clicking so loudly in Sirius' ears that he fights to restrain a shudder. "She's coming for yeh."

His back slips a little down the bark of the tree as the man stalks closer—ever closer. His knee buckles and he can do nothing but let himself stutter right with it. The other man watches with a feral leer, licks his lips, and then he's _there._

They're fighting to breathe the same air—lungs burning, stomach churning, and eyes wide with something more than fear. Sirius sees madness in the man before him. Perhaps it's more than madness; maybe it's beyond his capability to comprehend, but Sirius understands just a little bit of it. He can reach out and touch it, can wrap his hands around it and know that some part of that darkness is his, too. He falters beneath the realization that he's already part of this; he's already lost to whatever seed of hysteria he'd hoped to avoid.

"Oh yes, Black," he whispers against Sirius' neck. "Yeh know what's coming. Yer boy Lupin's been messin' with the wrong packs, he has. It's about time someone taught him a lesson and we all know how much he hates what he is. Maybe now he'll hate you too." His words are sour, but Sirius devours them. "Close yer eyes and it'll be over soon."

He doesn't fight. He doesn't struggle or argue. His quick wit has nothing to say. He knows it's pointless to battle the inevitable.

Instead—when Fenrir releases him and says his parting words, he drops to the ground. He sits until the guards drag him into the boat and then up to his cell. He sits there when the dementors bring him food and seek out their own. He sits there for three days, ticking each one off in his head as she calls to him, burning through his veins.

He sits. He _waits_.

* * *

She whispers to him as he huddles on the floor beneath the darkness of night. Her words linger at the back of his eyes where he can't scratch them away, where they're twitching closer and closer to something he doesn't want to acknowledge.

Soon.

When it comes, he's not prepared. He doesn't know how anyone can be prepared for _this_. Her siren song is wretched; it's not beautiful. It has no saving grace except that it ends as soon as the pain begins.

His screams drown amongst the rest; Azkaban has no shortage of agony. While he tears himself apart, biting at flesh that is his—but not his—because it's _hers_ , his screams turn to howls and whines.

At the end, when he's become her creature, he paces. He scratches at the walls and bites at the unfamiliar fur. He snaps at the air with jowls dripping red foam. _She_ asks him to be hers and he doesn't know what that means, doesn't know how to be _that_ in this place, so he continues to tear himself apart piece by piece.

When she shifts, allows him the façade of returning to who he really is, Sirius breathes. He inhales the salty air and chokes on it. The smell of blood as it wells up around the beds of his fingernails is too much. His throat contracts and his stomach lurches, but he can't bring anything up—he hasn't eaten in days.

Sirius stares at his fingers. His head sways just long enough for him to realize he's missing a fingernail. He remembers that he'd bitten off a claw the night before—then his eyes close to _nothing_.

* * *

She's held him captive for so long he barely knows who he is—but some part of him _remembers_. He knows the word _Sirius_ used to mean something, but he's not entirely sure at what point he lost the grasp of it. Perhaps it was three years in when he broke his toe jumping after a rat who dared to enter his cell. It could have been seven years in when he'd behaved so poorly during one of the Minister's visits they'd had him strung up in the middle of his cell and tortured for days—he was lucky he knew _anything_ after that. No—he thinks it closer to nine years when he could no longer remember the exact outline of Remus' face. That had to be it. Nine years.

It only takes him another three to figure out the rest.

The wolf is not pleased when Sirius becomes Padfoot. He rages and paces and Sirius walks oddly, his paws not always moving in the correct order. His hackles are up and the tip of his tail sticks out at an odd angle as opposed to the rest of it.

Squeezing through the bars is difficult. His head is a little big, as are his hips, but the lack of food helps him here. Padfoot's lean body slips through easily. Few notice a black shadow moving through the halls and those who do think he's a Grim, so shrink into the far reaches of their cell.

Dementors generally ignore him in his Animagus form, so Padfoot goes unnoticed until he's at the gates. Sirius nabs a set of keys from a sleeping guard, carrying them between his teeth. Beyond the confines of Azkaban prison, Padfoot wends across the breakwalls. Waves of ocean spray assault him and several times he's knocked off his paws. When he reaches the water's edge, Padfoot takes a few panting breaths and leaps in.

He doesn't know where he is when he makes it across. He doesn't do anything but lay in the sand and breathe, struggling with the wolf to wait until he's able to move again.

Sirius Black is free.

* * *

Sirius knows the way to this house. He treads carefully along the path, head down, fingers opening and closing at his sides.

Just as he's lifting a hand to knock at the door, it opens.

"Sirius?" The wary voice trails the rail-thin man standing before him. His skin is nearly opaque, leaving bones bare and brittle beneath. "Is it really you?" The words don't come out of his mouth as they should—they stick a little, so he licks his lips and tries again. "Wait—how?" Sirius can see the anger welling up behind sea-green eyes and raises a hand to stop him.

"It's me."

Remus' fingers grab the doorframe and Sirius watches closely, afraid he'll tear part of the wood away. "What makes you think you can come here?" He's breathing deeply through his nose. "Now? After all you've done?" His words slither out like tendrils of a cat o' nine that lick across Sirius' skin and leave silent welts.

"I—"

He breathes out sharply, but stops when Remus pushes past him with a hand on his shoulder. "Who did you bring with you? Why would you bring someone—"

Remus pauses. He leans toward Sirius, sniffs at his nape. Sirius growls softly, though he doesn't mean to.

"Sirius?" This time, it's a soft question. "What the fuck is going on?"

"Moony, we need to go inside." Sirius turns toward the other man, sees his amber eyes and steps back.

Remus crosses his arms. "We're not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on."

"Damn it, Moony!" Sirius tries to run his fingers through his tangled mane, but they get stuck and he throws his hands in the air in exasperation. "There is so much you don't know. There's just so much."

When Sirius turns back toward Remus, his normally slate eyes have gone charcoal and Remus stares, tilts his chin, and doesn't speak. Instead, he scents the air and listens to the erratic beat of Sirius' heart as he struggles with which terrible thing to say first.

"I killed them, Remus."

This pulls Remus out of his shock and he's striding forward, struggling to pin his former friend to the ground and—failing? "What did you just say?"

"I killed them. I'm a bloody coward and they died for it! I couldn't do it. I wasn't strong enough to be secret keeper so I made James switch." Sirius takes several deep breaths. "I made James choose another."

Remus leans back and wipes his brow—panting a little, for once, at the effort of subduing someone else. He keeps his silence.

Short huffs lift Remus atop his chest and Sirius feels the other man slide to the ground, watches as his forehead drops slowly into the palm of his hand and grounds him there.

"I made him choose Peter. I thought he was safest!" Sirius is desperate now. The great heaving is moving his entire body and tears flow freely as he rakes at his thighs with nails that are more shards of flesh. "I never thought he-" Sirius hiccoughs, "he would be the death of us all."

"What do you mean, Sirius? What are you saying?" A sharp slap reverberates in the open spaces between his teeth and his tongue settles deep for the aftershocks.

Sirius looks up at him. "I'm saying he betrayed us, Remus. He betrayed us to the Dark Lord. He—"

"What about the finger that was found? What about all the blood?"

"That little thing?" Sirius scoffs. His eyes dance as Remus watches him. "The rat bastard cut the bloody thing off so everyone would believe we killed him." Sirius' dark eyes are intense, grabbing hold of Remus and keeping him still. "And everyone did." He pauses there, trying not to let the pain he's been carrying alone in a cell for twelve years overwhelm him. "It's too bad I saw him in the papers—the fucking Prophet of all things. He never could leave well enough alone."

"What about—" Remus leans over and gestures to his neck and eyes after smelling him again. "—this?"

Sirius' face falls. "Going away present from Fenrir. He wanted me to have something to remember you by." He remembers the parting words as Fenrir left his cell that day: _Yer boy Remus was one I could never tame. Perhaps you'll do a better job than I did._

Sirius shudders.

"Fenrir did this?" Remus struggles with something, chews on the words and tries to digest them as if his stomach disagrees and they want to come back up.

Sirius doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. Remus can smell the wolf and everything in him wants to challenge, to dominate, to figure out where this new wolf is in the pack order.

Their eyes meet. Amber to charcoal.

"Moony?"

There are no words. There are hands and teeth. There are shredded pieces of clothing and hair that's tugged on a bit too roughly, which lands softly in the grass. There are half-moon marks in skin where nails hold on tightly and indentations from teeth where the need to claim is just too intense. There are tongues mapping things new and old—scents and scars and curves and _pain_. There are grunts and gasps and open-mouthed, arched-back moments of _pure ecstasy_ , but—

When it's over, when they're spent and sweaty and lying beside one another in the silent grass with the wind whispering devilish things—she will call to them.

She will always call to them, for that is the curse of the damned.


End file.
